Gesture #1

In recent years technology has progressed to make it possible to record our world and ourselves in three dimensions or more. Software companies are already applying these advances to allow us to use body gestures to control increasingly intuitive interfaces. The body captured by these devices is no longer a flat representation of reality but rather a cloud of data. Perhaps not entirely unlike the cubist body or the abstract expressionist body, this is a body free from representative constraints. When combined in series across time this body behaves like a paintbrush; faces smear, hands ripple. When distributed across a network with data from others these brushstrokes evoke eternal life, however when captured, rendered or printed, they evoke the opposite – after all, data unrefreshed is dead. A speculative identity emerges from this network, a projected identity that flows through everyone and everything. For Bailey’s next solo exhibition at Pari Nadimi Gallery, Next Big Thing, he will present new gestural paintings and software authored by this new identity.

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